Spencer Tweedy — son of Wilco's Jeff — recently participated in a musicians-review-musicians project for The Talkhouse, dropping expletive-laden praise for hip-hop's hottest album.
He chose to take a close look at Killer Mike and El-P's modern hip-hop classic Run the Jewels 2, and if that sounds like an odd selection, the intro is an even bigger curveball.
"Neil Young is an out-of-touch motherf----r," the review begins.
After some lengthy Young-centric misdirection, Tweedy arrives at his point: Run the Jewels is the antithesis to Young. They are actually edgy.
"They're the gangster rappers who actually give a s--t," Tweedy writes. "They make enlightenment look cool, and make all the other guys who glamorize ignorance look like f--kboys. They are a modern face of protest and I'm A-OK with that."
The teenager is a smart dude and whips out plenty of "I'm very intelligent, but also lackadaisically hip" moments.
Note his conclusion: "If the political identity of Run the Jewels has a problem, it's the same one that Neil Young and every other overt musician-activist has had before them: abstraction of authority. It's an inherent limitation of poetry itself more than anything of the artists' actual doing; when you distill real-world issues involving real-world humans down into make-believe art, you're bound to lose a lot of nuance in the process. The result is a body of lyrics that sound like they're radical — the go-out-and-kill-cops, too-radical kind of radical — but which, I think, are still smart."
When the album dropped a couple weeks ago, we ran a story with across-the-board positive reviews from various outlets, so it is no surprise that Tweedy gave the album a passing grade.
Spencer and his dad put out their own album, Sukierae, this year under the name Tweedy.
Our own Kim Jones reported on the album's background in Septmeber: "Sukierae, the upcoming album from Tweedy, was inspired by Jeff's attempts to come to grips with Miller's illness in a positive way. When he talked to Rolling Stone earlier this month, he shared that Sukierae is Miller's nickname.
"Spencer Tweedy, who put off going to Wisconsin's Lawrence University for a year in order to be there with his family, said, 'Mom is kind of the center of everything. I have no problem enshrining my mother in an album. It makes sense. She's No. 1 in the whole operation.'"